Inferior

A police inquiry into an affair of prostitution involving an under-age call girl could not have come at a worse time for Raymond Domenech and his players just 50 days before the start of the World Cup.

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So when it emerges that a player of the stature of the 27-year-old Bayern Munich midfielder Ribery could face a spell in prison for having sexual relations with an under-age prostitute it’s hard to underestimate the damage that has on team morale.

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Ribery and an entire nation of football fans now face an anxious wait to find out whether the judge leading the inquiry will bring charges against arguably the most gifted player in Domenech’s squad.

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For sure Domenech has plenty on his plate at the moment without this latest damaging distraction which comes after Henry’s infamous handball which led to the goal that sent France to South Africa at the expense of the Republic of Ireland last November.

Really? Those are our priorities for sympathy? Because let’s not forget the underage prostitute, who is a kid for crying out loud, and who has been exploited many times over by adult men.

BM i have had some brutal jobs and when i saw that story my initial reaction was akin to yours. mostly i was worried for the sex worker. She could easily now be the target of some kind of revenge from fans of the team. that is, i think, the greatest immediate danger she faces other than the ever-present possibility of the “ugly mug”. one of the hardest things that i have ever done was the first time i held the door open as a young woman left the detox that i worked at before the end of their program. it was clear, tho unstated, where she would be working in less than an hour, but we had neither the legal right nor the physical capacity to prevent her from leaving.

one of the things that struck me several weeks later was my relief that she was, physically, unhurt, that most of her clients had paid up and that she had decided to try detox again. what became clear over subsequent visits was that the clients that paid and were un-violent were the least traumatic elements of her existence. exploitative dealers, harassment from older sex workers, even the process of detox itself with it’s resurfacing memories and “head miles” were more traumatic.

i learnt a lot from that young woman and other women and men like her. In relation to your post I found that any focus on that part of her client base that paid up was counterproductive, that it was vitally important that we address the reasons that she was on the street in the first place, the reasons that she first took the dr*gs that she took in vain attempts to block out the pain. unfortunately there was no happy ending for this woman.

You make me think quite a lot BM, and for that i thank you. I’m sorry if this comment is too dark, but given the subject matter there is not much alternative. This story angered me ‘cause it placed the young woman in additional danger as well as marginalizing her.

I love how no one pays attention to the pain of the underage prostitute. Did anyone think of the mental and physical torture that this girl is going through? Why would a sports game be more important than this girl’s life??
I’m not even close to understanding that.

You know what I love? I love how the writer of this blog post gets all rage-y about an underage prostitute and tries to make it sound like a little waif of a child was getting porked by a big mean evil man. She was 16 fucking years old. If this were a 16-year-old boy, no one would give a flying fuck, including you. Was this illegal? Yes, of course. Was this a case of a helpless, innocent child getting raped by the evil, evil penis? Not in a fucking million years.

Am I replying to a three year old blog post? Why yes I am, because if some other persons happens upon this, they deserve to know that feminism, while usually a noble philosophy, is occasionally full of shit.

Jake – you’re getting one comment in this vein and then you’ll be blocked so enjoy it because I am not going to argue age of consent laws with you. Those laws exist for fucking good reasons and to argue otherwise is the very essence of being full of shit.

She was under-age – that means below the age of consent. That means she’s a kid, not an adult. He was not a kid, he was not a just-turned adult, he was fucking 27 years old!

For the record, I would give a fuck about an under-age boy being used for prostitution too. And I’ve written about the societal double standard here before.

There’s a reason for consent laws – I don’t know what part of you wants to justify having sexual interactions with kids as an adult, no matter how waifish or otherwise they are, I don’t get that. Frankly, I don’t want to know how your brain comes to think that is ok, it repulses me. And I don’t know what part of you wants to think that when an under-age kid works in prostitution that she hasn’t experienced a bit of abuse from ‘big evil men’ in her time.